


From Fire

by foreverhalffull



Category: Cormoran Strike Series - Robert Galbraith
Genre: And there's not a happy ending for at least ten years, F/M, Too Painful And Cruel To Even Be Called Angst Anymore, implied suicidal ideation, tw: rape recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:49:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26960137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foreverhalffull/pseuds/foreverhalffull
Summary: "Her maternal grandfather had died just before she dropped out of university: she'd gone home for the funeral and never gone back. She remembered very little of the occasion: it had taken everything she'd had to preserve a fragile façade of well-being, and she remembered the strange sense of disembodiment that underlay the eggshell brittleness with which she'd met the half-scared inquiries of family members who knew what had happened to her."-Troubled Bloodp. 543-544
Relationships: Matthew Cunliffe/Robin Ellacott
Comments: 8
Kudos: 13





	From Fire

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there!   
> Thanks so much for clicking on this story; it always makes me happy that even a single one of you wants to read something I've written.  
> But before we get into this one, I just need to take a minute to address the content warnings in the tags. This fic is very very very dark and is set in the first couple of weeks after Robin's attack. It doesn't necessarily handle that in a pretty or careful way; though there are no graphic descriptions of what happened to her, her brain isn't particularly nice or hopeful about what her life will be like after. Again, she's in a very very very dark place. If you think depictions of rape recovery or depression may be triggering to you, please please _please_ do not read this. No fic is worth risking your mental health, ever, at all, period, and I absolutely do not want to do anyone harm by telling this part of Robin's story.  
> If you feel comfortable sticking around, I hope you're touched by it and as always, thank you for reading! Please don't hesitate to reach out to me in the comments or on discord if this brings up something you need to get off your chest, and alwaysalways seek the professional care you deserve, as well <3

Robin Ellacott was in hiding, of sorts. There was no hiding what had happened to her, of course, the process of examining and evidencing and cold-metal-ing her trauma had been witnessed by many professionals: physicians, nurses, police officers, a psychiatrist, all of them women. Her parents had been called when she was admitted to the hospital and had arrived more quickly than speed limits should have allowed, and Stephen had sent a care package, and the friends she’d been out with _that night_ had given statements, and even her abnormal psych study partner had sent his best wishes, and her housemates had been on eggshells. Everyone knew, though Robin wasn’t sure whether she preferred it this way or not. 

The soft and considerate and lovely Robin she’d always known worried whether this degree of public knowledge meant that all of these individuals would forever see her as a victim, and wondered how she would ever face them again when she was ready to re-enter the world as a survivor. A new Robin, one who was grey and shadowy and mince-thin and evil told her that it didn’t matter what people _thought,_ she would only ever _be_ a victim. She would never amount to anything, or anyone, worthwhile again, her identity and achievements were to be forever frozen at age twenty.

So it wasn’t the fact of what had happened which Robin was hiding, but rather herself. She had, over the past weeks, stayed in bed for days at a time before venturing, only once in a blue moon and usually in the hours of guaranteed silence around 4 a.m., when even the latest of the partiers and studiers would be sleeping and the earliest risers not yet bright eyed or bushy-tailed, into her accommodation’s shared kitchen to rummage together the simplest meal she could find, tucking it under one arm inside of her blanket-shroud to eat in the sacred secludedness of her bedroom. 

Her hair had been washed only twice since the bath her mother had given her to rinse the blood from it after she’d been discharged from the hospital. It had felt so much like her vague, sleepy memories of being cleaned and cared for when she’d wet the bed as a child, and with the same un-earned guilt for an occurrence she had not chosen. The memory of that child, her innocence and naivety and faith in the goodness and fairness of the world which lay ahead of her for the learning but never, she’d imagined, for the hurting, caused her more sadness than it should have. Why did happy memories, like racing Stephen for the best donkey at Skegness, bring her not joy but rather a desire to smother that young girl before someone else did, extinguishing the light in her eyes forevermore?

It was this inner child whom Robin wanted to bury, if not in the literal sense in order to prevent her from growing up to experience the pain she just had, then within herself as a witness protection programme of sorts, so that she could recover from, or be sheltered from facing the pragmatic consequences of, the villainy and torture and anguish and tragedy and physical and psychological pain her near-adult self had endured. So that she, the bright-eyed baby Robin, could still wear her police cap and order her unruly, disrespectful brothers around in their games of make believe and dream of one day having similar caps and responsibilities in the grown-up world. Near-adult Robin had dull and sunken eyes and no dreams, only nightmares.

She’d harbored for six years a secret, cerebral happy place: the mental image of her future office, glassy and airy but with enough homey touches to put her patients at ease. She knew the Manchester police department had no similarly-decorated offices, she’d researched their headquarters, but she nevertheless imagined she’d be there employed, despite her boyfriend’s dreams of living and working in London. Perhaps they would have renovated by the time Robin had earned her corner office. 

But today, the image which had cheered and determined her through every high and low since early adolescence failed for the first time. She could not picture the office without imagining herself questioning a victim of the same heinous crime which had just relegated her insides to an outside where they didn’t belong and she couldn’t take any of that back or fix it or undo it and how the hell could she make a single helpful contribution to an investigation when she could not even stand to open her own eyes under a pile of her softest blankets?

Robin Ellacott the forensic psychologist was dead. And Robin Ellacott the girl from Yorkshire wanted to be, too. 

Her mind flitted next, without explanation, to a view of her parents’ expansive lawn four years previously, when an early cold front had forced the trees bare before their leaves had turned, and to the uncomfortably but subtly wrong image of green leaves buried beneath an inch of snow.

When her parents had returned to Masham after the days they’d spent at her bedside, she’d assured them, as she’d assured herself, that she could get through it. It was past mid-term, and she’d see herself victoriously through the end of exams before allowing herself the memory of home, the privilege of breaking down. She’d get through it, feathers from fire, as she’d always done, except now in the dark and oppressive coldness of her university accommodation, having not moved in nearly forty hours, Robin Ellacott was reminded harshly of the fact that the hardest thing she’d ever endured before this was the death of her beloved pony Angus, and that single week of sixth form when her father had left after a particularly bad row with the ever-overbearing Linda Ellacott. 

Her initial conviction to not let a man in a gorilla mask determine the course of her life was being steadily replaced by GreyThinEvil Robin’s desire to convince herself, quiet hour by quiet hour, that she was nothing and that her disappearance would be noticed by no one. Gorilla Man couldn’t exactly determine the course of her life if she decided she refused to live, could he?

It was from the depths of this state that Robin received a phone call from home she should have dreaded.

She was quite sure she would never forgive herself for the immediate, intense relief and gratitude she felt upon receiving the news that her maternal grandfather had passed. In other circumstances she would probably have felt guilt and sadness for the fact that she hadn’t taken great initiative in communicating with her Poppy since she’d moved to uni and they could no longer speak at Sunday dinner each week. Though with her parents she’d always felt pressure to be their easy child, never making a fuss or expressing her needs, her grandfather had always doted on Robin, his only granddaughter amidst a sea of boys, and their relationship had been quite special – easily one of the closest in Robin’s life.

Now, though, it was reduced to a bitter end, the simple facts that Robin desired nothing more than the welcome reason to leave school for her bedroom in Masham, and that she could not add a single drop more of grief to the burden which already weighed on not just her road-weary shoulders but her eyelids, making them drowsy, her stomach, making it full, and her heart, which was empty and bursting at once.

Matthew, bless him, had come from Bath days before to look after her. Robin had only one housemate with whom she was particularly close, and though Violet had met Robin’s parents once and Stephen when he’d stayed with them for a weekend months before, the only person she knew how to contact was Matt, which she did when she noted Robin not eating, not speaking, not emerging. When Robin protested at this intervention, Violet reasoned that if someone didn’t help Robin return to her former self, the university would notice she’d not been turning up to her classes, and indeed had not been seen anywhere since the night she’d shivered for hours in the harshly fluorescent hospital with a paper gown and watery tea and pain, and they would call her parents. 

But Matthew had been a better support than Robin could have hoped, especially given that, though she’d been denying it to herself, Robin had been steadily drifting away from being in love with him for quire some time. Now, though, she felt such affection — if she were capable, with her dirty and wretched and ruined body of feeling such a pure emotion – returning, as he did not say the things she’d feared any rational person would: “Robin, it’s been twenty-four days, don’t you think you should be better by now?” or “Robin, you’ll obviously never recover, you know the psychology of survivorship,” or “Robin, don’t you want to give the rest of the way up?”

No, he sat with her at the distance she required and rarely said anything at all. He fed her soup and crackers and banana and vitamins and milk and toffees, in a rotation, whenever she seemed lucid enough to swallow them without gagging, which often happened. It was hard to control even that coordinated movement of swallowing which her body had betrayed her by forgetting from its list of trusty reflexes.

He did not touch her unless she initiated, holding her hands or wiping her tears or sometimes, when her waist-length hair fanned out on the pillow beside her while she faced the wall, with whose cracks and scuffmarks she was becoming depressingly familiar, he would card his fingers gently and soothingly through the ends of it, not too close to her shoulders or neck or back. Just far enough, just loving enough.

And each night he slept on the floor, with one hand reached up to clutch her blanket but not her person in a tight, protective fist, to show he was there when she needed him. It was never a question of _if_ but always _when,_ and it was always when Robin sat straight up, screaming to escape the hands around her throat which were each night her own, though they’d once been large and gloved and not hers. These hardly hurt less, though the ring of bruises they left was visible only in her mind and in the bags beneath her Matthew’s eyes.

Sweet Matthew, perfect Matthew, _safe_ Matthew. When he heard the news about Robin’s grandfather, he knew without asking that his Robin would be unable to face a swaying train carriage filled to the brim with strangers, their noises, their smells, the risk that one of them could bump into her at any moment. Without being asked he rang the car rental nearest to Robin’s university and walked there to collect a vehicle at an exorbitant rate, and though Robin had always been the one to drive them in her parents’ ten-year-old Land Rover on their dates and day-trips, it was he who conducted them down the familiar motorways to Masham while Robin’s silent grey gaze remained fixed unblinkingly on the plastic framing of the passenger side of the windscreen. He drove one-handed and held onto her right hand, their entwined palms resting on the console for the entirety of the journey, wishing he could inject a bit of life or comfort into Robin via the physical connection.

He’d made one foolish, amateur mistake by failing to visit the loo before they’d left Robin’s shared house and thus needed to stop for the entirety of their journey, but he knew Robin was neither up to the task of entering a roadside services or of sitting alone in the car while untold travelers walked past the vehicle. He could make one small sacrifice if it eased even a fraction of the many pains his love was enduring. 

When Matthew delivered Robin to her parent’s house, in apparently one piece, they welcomed him in, fed him tea, and then sent him on his merry way to his parents’ house with the promise to see him at the church, St. Mary the Virgin, the next morning for Linda’s father’s service.

Robin sat on her bed after tea, immersed in the comfortable downcast loneliness she hadn’t revisited in days, wondering how she’d manage to sleep without the grounding tug of Matthew’s grip on her blankets. She stared up at the Destiny’s Child poster on her wall, recalling from the depths of her lately-underused but nevertheless pristine memory that their song had been playing in the student bar as she’d left _that night,_ only a dozen or so minutes before the bright-eyed Robin’s life had been violently ended, making it the very last song she’d heard. GreyThinEvil Robin did not like music. She did not like any reminder that the outside world existed or contained any morsel of happiness or worth, because those were things which masked men could rob from you.

Despite her worries, Robin did manage to sleep, restlessly, with only herself as both soother and patient, strangler and remover of hands when she woke darkly in the middle of the night. When she awoke the second time, it was lighter out but marked similarly with a bloodcurdling scream. Her baby brother, Jonathan, had snuck into her room and jumped onto her bed for a morning cuddle, and she had pushed him forcefully off of the covers and nearly halfway across the room, where he was now crying and nursing a bleeding elbow. The force of the push had taken nearly all of the energy reserves her emaciated body could offer and she was doubled over, face buried in a pillow and panting shallowly when Michael Ellacott burst into the room to investigate the source of the commotion.

“Oh, darlings.” After a moment of indecision, he moved to comfort his daughter first, but she wished him away at the sound of his footsteps.

“Go.” She gestured with her entire arm toward the door to the hallway. “Take him, and go.”

Little Jon was crying harder now, not understanding why his favourite sibling didn’t want to cuddle him, or play cops and robbers, or laugh at his jokes as she always kindly had. He had no idea that his parents’ exciting trip to America earlier in the month had truly been a trip only hours away to visit Robin, or that it had not been a happy one. 

Robin’s day did not improve from its violent and disconcerting start. She had not yet faced so many people since the attack and found herself downing an inadvisable combination of pain pills and liquor from her parents’ cabinet after breakfast in anticipation of the difficulty it would be to uphold an air of stability during the ceremony. Though she wanted nothing less than to return to the dim, recently-acquired filth and anxiety of her student accommodation, she must appear to be holding it together so that news of her wretchedness would not spread to the gossip circles of Masham and so that she would be trusted enough to care for herself, trusted enough to return. At least the church women of Masham, if no one else who knew her, would maintain an unpitiable image of their proudest village girl.

Things were hardly off to a good start but managed to spiral even lower halfway through the receiving line in the narthex, a social construction Robin was quickly growing to rue. Who the hell had imagined that a line of acquaintances, many of them distant, their condolences all the same, would make any grieving family feel the slightest bit better?

The one woman who chose a different greeting, and who was secured a far less warm spot in Robin’s memory for it, was her father’s sister Nancy. Though the mother of Robin’s favourite cousin, Katie, Nancy was from that day forward Robin’s least-favourite aunt by far. 

“You’re looking so lovely, Robin!” she’d cooed, but Robin could not find it within herself to be pleased that her disguise had worked. It had required a great deal of makeup to hide the weary, prematurely weathered lines in her face and the dullness in her eyes. 

“I see you’ve finally lost that fresher’s stone!” And she reached out as if to pinch Robin’s cheek — or perhaps her upper arm, Robin wasn’t sure which — but before she could even begin to flinch back, Stephen reached his arm deeply into Nancy’s personal space for an unreasonably firm handshake, effectively cutting off the unwelcome gesture which would certainly have caused Robin’s third panic attack of the morning.

“Thanks. New diet.” Robin managed, hoping her out-of-practice facial muscles were forming a smile. Whatever they were doing, they were screaming at her for daring to move them after nearly a month of slack-jawed emptiness. Her face did not even scrunch up to cry anymore; the tears just fell like water off an open palm held beneath a faucet, meeting neither resistance nor cupped-handed attempts to contain them.

In reality Robin had lost more weight than her aunt’s crass nickname had suggested, which had forced her mother to tack up even the smallest of Robin’s black dresses to create an appropriate fit for the service. Robin had apologized quietly, a feeling which presented less emotionally on the outside but was curdling, boiling, grief and shame and guilt on the inside for having failed her mother, on this Linda’s hardest day, by having needs she could not address independently and could not hide. 

Her mother had softly whispered that it was okay, that she was happy to have a practical distraction from her grief, that she wanted nothing more than to be the support Robin needed, and she kindly pinned the dress over a form rather than Robin’s body, allowing her daughter to measure her own bust and waistline and hips, rather than doing the taking in while knelt beside Robin’s abdomen as she’d always done before, despite the fact that this distanced system required many more attempts to create a passable result.

Robin followed the line of mourners into the sanctuary and sat sandwiched between her brothers and Matthew, a visibly larger gap from her shoulders to Matthew’s and to Stephen’s than between any other two people on their pew. The gap felt like a personal, glaring, obvious prison and Robin resented it for drawing her attention and her capacity for grief from the body of her grandfather which was only metres away. She could not bring herself to look at it, or indeed to look up at all, and for the first time in her life, Robin did not turn her gaze to the crab on the wall which had been for two decades her private curiosity and first investigation.


End file.
